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POPSLove, Hate - Uncertainty "In a society desperate to find certainty, and beset on all sides by people who claim to have it, this seems like a suitable moment to show that the idea of certainty-from-on-high was discredited 100 years ago. I wanted to tell the stories of the people who made this discovery and the great personal price they paid. A line of thinkers from Georg Cantor to Alan Turing saw the extent of the uncertainty in science, and incompleteness in logic and mathematics, and understood what we still haven't grasped as a culture. I am fascinated by just how reluctant we are to face up to what these heroes revealed."
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POPSEven the Giants Can Learn to Think Small BACK in the waning days of the 20th century, little start-up companies couldn’t wait to get big. Growth was their entree to the upper echelon, to millions in venture capital and tens of millions more in an initial public offering of stock. Getting big meant taking advantage of economies of scale, putting the company name on a ballpark, creating a global distribution network and hiring the industry’s best to conduct big-picture research.
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POPSNeuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset. It's an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene. If you imagine something that you have never actually seen, like a Pluto sunset, the possibilities for creative thinking become much greater because the brain can no longer rely on connections shaped by past experience. In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. As Mark Twain said, "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become. Interesting read
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POPSAbout That Pelosi, Pickens Plan To Pick Our Pocket
but the then necessary development of the infrastructure and conversion to such energy will take even longer. We are not going to abandon gas and oil any time soon, no matter what the loudest advocates of renewable energy sources insist. As a writer noted at Fosters.com, a sane energy policy will require tuning in to a program of multiple sources. Fossil fuels -- developed and yet to be developed -- wind power nearing a scope envisioned by T. Boone Pickens, solar power, nuclear power, biomass, geothermal power and sources we haven't thought of yet are in our future - as in waaay in our future. Pickens' plan is bold — too bad it won't work The Pickens Plan isn't the boon for energy independence that it purports to be. Dallas billionaire investor and oilman-turned-wind-farmer Boone Pickens unveiled an audacious plan that he hopes will prod policymakers into a more realistic discussion of energy issues. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5882292.html
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POPSScuba Diving Animals These animals can scuba dive using suits made by their owners. Check out the article on howstuffworks.com for more information.
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POPSLatent Love of Dolls
Deirdre sent me a link to Mimi Kirchner's blog and it made me start thinking about dolls. I have to admit I have always loved dolls: Barbie and friends, baby dolls that you could dress and feed, soft huggable stuffed dolls. I loved dressing up dolls. The dolls always looked glamourous and could walk in their tarty shoes, which wasn't always the case for me! Dolls always provided an opportunity to play house and have things go my way for once. Dolls are also a great opportunity for creativity. As I have been washing and pressing the fabric from my trip to the East Coast, I have been cutting off schnibbles. I keep thinking to myself what great hair it would be, which further makes me think that Art Warrior and Mother Warrior may need a new friend. Mimi's dolls are really creative and beautiful, but they also have a lot of personality. They are also BIG, and, presumably, huggable. I am really glad to have the blogosphere accessible to be, because it is just a fountain of cr
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POPSCreative people sleep on their work Sleeping is what creative thinkers do. When a think-tank guy sleeps, he is not "sleeping on his job." He is. believe it or not, "working out" on his thoughts. This is an automatic occurrence for thinkers. they dont even know it's happening... sometimes. Then when they wake up, "Eureka!" They start typing in their thoughts and wont stop until it's done.
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POPSTools for creating ideas More at site. Including, Mind-mapping: Hierarchical breakdown and exploration. Modeling: For the artist in everyone. Morphological Analysis: Forcing combinations of attribute values. Nominal Group Technique: Getting ideas with minimal personal interaction. # PSI: Problem + Stimulus = Idea! Rightbraining: Combine incomplete doodles around the problem. Role-play: Become other people. Let them solve the problem. Reversal: Looking at the problem backwards. Reverse Brainstorming: Seek first to prevent your problem from happening. SCAMPER: Using action verbs as stimuli. Six Thinking Hats: Think comfortably in different ways about the problem. Storyboarding: Creating a visual story to explore or explain. Contradiction Analysis: Use methods already used in many patents. Unfolding: Gradually unfolding the real problem from the outside. # Visioning: Creating a motivating view of the future. Write streaming: Write and write and write until you unblock.
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POPSSpore - A Computer Game to Teach our Children Long Term Thinking This game is about evolution and exploring our universe at all scales from the microscopic to the galactic. It is about the 'Big Picture' of life, and how to think about it in a multilevel multiscale fashion. It will give a real grasp of the complexity and interconnectedness of life, and will educate the players holistic long term thinking and planning. Watch the fascinating presentation of Will Wright in TED. Toys may change the world by changing us. I am all for it, and can't wait playing :-)
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POPSConfessions of a Wi-Fi Thief Some people thought of creative names for their networks: ParisBrooklyn, MessageInaBottle. Some were boring: linksys, NETGEAR, default. I was always happy to see the boring ones, because the people who don't bother thinking of clever names for their home networks are the same people who don't bother to password-protect them (A website called ThinkGeek.com sells a T shirt with a battery-powered wi-fi detector that displays the ambient signal strength wherever you happen to be standing. It's supercool, though if I'm too cheap to pay for broadband, I'm definitely too cheap to spend $30 on a T shirt.)
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POPSCan the Singularity Save Us From Ourselves? Persons who believe firmly in the inevitability of The Singularity might be surprised to learn that the default human society is the closed society, resistant to change. Most of them have never known anything but open societies, born of western civilization’s restless urge to expand intellectual horizons. They live in an exceptional time, in an exceptional society, yet somehow believe it to be the human default. That type of blindness comes from forgetting to study history.
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POPSCan You Become a Creature of New Habits? “I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” .... “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.” ... three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs. “Getting into the stretch zone is good for you .. “It helps keep your brain healthy ... unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases.
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POPSD(iscover) the R(eal) M(eaning) of 'free'
Just to make sure I haven't confused anyone no there is no DRM on the music at opsound. &Yeah you're prolly thinking: okay this is prolly a bunch of hippy crap or looped-samples. Well you could prolly find it there, I haven't yet. Instead its inspired my current, &now entire, music collection. As an open source artist where I express my art using code, distributed as software, &completely truly for free. I've always felt this was the best model of distributing art, of all forms. Before there was Beatnik Turtle, Geoff Smith, or Jonathan Coulton(all of whom I love). But first there was opsound the 'free' record label. My fave feature: their feeds. Genres, artists, newest songs, &more they offer feeds for them all. So go browse their online store, find some new music, have way to much fun, &support them &their artists. Tell your friends; send opsound &their artists emails; see want free media can really be; &most importantly enjoy yourself. Oh... &you can donate too, *wink*
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POPSCan You Become a Creature of New Habits? “The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
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